Smile! God is not watching you…

Richard Dawkins is a rock-star, or better to say: a science-star. That adjective for scientists is like “sober” for writers, something that hypothetically could happens but in practice doesn’t exist. He wrote the best seller “The selfish gene”  introducing us the idea of the “memes”. At the present He is a professorial fellow of New College of Oxford university.

Dr. Dawkins has been focused the last years in a new project, the divulgation of a pure science without any contamination of beliefs. As is written in his internet site: a clear-thinking oasis. The Richard Dawkins foundation in collaboration with the Skeptics Society have been developing several campaigns against religious thinking, -which is basically… NOT THINKING! The main hypothesis behind is that religious ideas contaminate the search of the physical truth. On the other hand it is precisely in the name of religion that most of the biggest atrocities of history has been done, therefore, ironically  religion could be the root of all evil.

Dawkins’s last campaign has become suddenly very famous because it is a little more aggressive than just seminars and lectures in universities. He has putted some ads in the London public transport with the slogan “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” In the words of Professor Dawkins: “Religion is accustomed to getting a free ride – automatic tax breaks, unearned respect and the right not to be offended, the right to brainwash children. Even on the buses, nobody thinks twice when they see a religious slogan plastered across the side. This campaign to put alternative slogans on London buses will make people think – and thinking is anathema to religion.”

It is amazing how religion has survived unprosecutable so many years when it is just a thing of probes, there is no probe that God exists. The main problem is that religion say to you that “if you don’t believe in God you re going to hell”, but if you just let your brain work for a few seconds you will find that there is no reason to believe, not a single probe! Then, the words of Dawkins seem to be right, there is probably no God!

It is the time of debate, religions always avoid debate because they try to impose us that they have the reason (curiously a reason without any reasoning ) and when someone tries fight against that is accused of intolerance. I leave here a little cartoon to point out this last idea.

The tiny sad story of a little neuron called Jennifer.

The press in my country is simply pathetic. I think 99% percent of the articles are copies from those reported by agencies. The worst part is that journalists just translate  and transpose the articles into the paper (normaly with a lot of mistakes). They never take five minutes to call some expert to corroborate what they are writing. In Chili journalits study as minimum 5 years!!!! I wonder what the hell did they do during that huge lapse of time?!!!

This time, the source of my anger is an article appeared not long time ago in almost all newspapers . The funniest headline said something like: “Scientists found a neuron that responds only to the beauty of Jennifer Aniston” (ok, that newspaper is not the best example of the source in which you are going to look for real information, but the headlines of the more “serious” newspapers pointed in the same direction ).

I mean, Holy cow! We are in front of something really big here. God created a neuron for recognize Jennifer Aniston!!! That is the best probe of creationism… Evolution doesn’t now Miss Aniston, therefore God is the only one who could prapare  our brains for the arrival of this talented actress!!!

Being a little more serious, I strongly support the idea of leaving more space for science. Actually, scientists are usually looked like bizarre humanoids behind thick glasses, and science like some kind  of “too-complicated-thing” to even think to watch it on tv.  Science  is most of the time interesting and could be funny (ok, the recomendation is a little biased ), but no in that way. Usually media caricature science and don’t take the knowledge popularization as something serious. It is really important showing to the people what scientsts are doing because two main reasons; the first one ,most of the funds for sciences come from the citizens taxes, and second, when you know a little more about biology or physics an universal truth is revealed to you, and that is simply fantastic.

In countries like France or USA you cand find amazing tv documentaries made by really noted scientists and they have big audiences. Why in my country they can’t try something better? I remember las time I watched a good chilean scientific tv show  it  was ‘World 84′ (yes, in the same year!).

It was not the aim of this post to comment the research behind `jennifer’s neuron,  I promess there will come soon another post about Dr. Quiroga ‘s work with Aniston face.

Can you imagine what could happen if my Jennifer Aniston neuron is beside my Pinochet and Bush neurons? Just in case my sincere apologies jennifer, It was not me, It was my brain idea… Ehhh well, you understand.

The Starter

I know is not very  polite starting a blog with a robbery. Anyway I would like to open this blog with the following quote:

“False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science for they often endure long; but false hypotheses do little harm, as everyone takes a salutory pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path toward error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.”

This quote belongs to Charles Darwin and I would like to take it as the Statement of Principles and Ethics Guidelines of this Blog.